


Not the Horse but the Rider

by leahalexis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-14
Updated: 2008-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-24 15:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/264884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leahalexis/pseuds/leahalexis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruby lied when she said she'd picked an empty body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not the Horse but the Rider

The thing is, if Ruby  _had_  asked her, Addie would have said yes.

It's not as if she'd been using her body for anything—not as if she'd been able to. She'd been a vegetable. With Ruby riding her, she wasn't. With Ruby riding her, she could leave the hospital bed, feel the wind on her face, dance and eat and  _live_. So what if she wasn't the one calling the shots?

She likes Ruby, actually. She wouldn't have expected to—would have been grateful even if she hadn't—but she did. Ruby was everything Addie would have liked to be, if she'd been given the chance. Brash and funny and stubborn and yeah, okay, (she'd later learned) a demon, and a little selfish, but somehow that didn't matter as much as it should.

Because demon or not, Ruby was her savior. She'd been barely fifteen when the accident had put her into a coma, and she hadn't woken up again until Ruby showed up. If it weren't for Ruby, she'd never have become conscious again. She remembered, now that she was out of it, what it had been like: an endless plain of harsh nothingness, like television snow, signals flickering only briefly, indecipherable. Like hell. If it weren't for Ruby, she would have been trapped there until her body degraded, expired. And more importantly—if it weren't for Ruby, she never would have known Sam.

Sam. Sam Winchester. Oh God, even his name made her heart and gut seize up with longing, with pity, with  _love_ —the heart and gut that weren't just hers, but Ruby's now, too. They were both tied to one body; what she felt, Ruby felt too.

Which wasn't, she got the impression from Ruby's alarm the first time it had happened, the usual way these things went. The feelings should have only gone one way: what Ruby felt in Addie's body, Addie felt too. But that wasn't how it was with them. They were more like . . . partners.

Maybe Ruby had thought she'd been telling Sam the truth when she told him Addie's body had been empty—but Addie doubted it. Addie didn't blame her. Sam needed  _help_.

If she'd been able to speak, Addie would have been stricken dumb the first time she saw Sam. It wasn't so much what he looked like as what he didn't look like: as if, through the surprise at seeing her at his door, it really mattered to him that a girl he'd never seen before was thrusting a piece of paper in to his hands and ducking past him inside with barely a word. The depth of  _not caring_  nearly swallowed her—who cared so much, who was so grateful just to be here, conscious, again—whole.

She pieced the story together bit by bit over the next few weeks: who Dean was, what had happened to him, why Sam was so wrecked. She learned, too, watching Sam bleed and the smoke drain from men and women's mouths, what Ruby was and how this miracle Addie was experiencing had come to be. Slowly she began to understand the rules of the game she'd been brought into: the times you fought, and the times you ran. And Sam seemed to get better—to care more, to look more whole. But still, sometimes, when he didn't know she and Ruby were looking . . .

God, how it made her ache to see him look so broken. She'd grown to care so much about him; he was such a good man, such a true person, the kind she'd always dreamed of having someday. How could she do anything  _but_  love him?

Which would have been unbearable—being here, so close to him, unable to reach out and touch his face, his hair—except that, as she was falling . . . inexorably, helplessly, horrified, Ruby was falling too.

If Ruby's irritation was anything to go on, it was her, Addie's, fault that Ruby was feeling the things she felt. Addie's fault that Ruby was acting the way she'd begun to act—in Sam's interest rather than her own, her own obstinate, teeth-gritting selfishness slipping away. Addie was surprised Sam hadn't noticed the change—but then Sam was so wrapped up struggling against his own pain that she shouldn't have been. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that she and Ruby helped him. That she and Ruby kept him busy and focused and away from alcohol, made sure he ate and slept.

And then . . . and then Ruby did what Ruby does. She  _acted_. She took all Addie's longing and her own panicked desperation and crawled in under Sam's skin, lied and begged and borrowed her way into his bed, and Addie was  _glad_. "It's all me inside of here," Ruby had told Sam with Addie's lips, "there's no one else in here," and Ruby had known it wasn't true, and Addie didn't care. Faintly she had registered the devil's trap on the floor beneath their feet that first time, but it hadn't matter, she'd been trapped from the moment she'd seen him—from the moment Ruby had chosen her body.

But so had Ruby.

They were all trapped together.

God save her, but Addie had never been happier.


End file.
